I liked but didn't love this. I'm a walker, a Manhattan walker too -- but this trod ground, pun intended, that I felt I'd already seen. Teju Cole, Patti Smith, E.B. White, Colson Whitehead... plenty of people have written New York walking books that are part memoir, part story, part something else. This is another to add to that particular bookstore shelf but not the first I'd pull off to hand to someone looking to start their (pun intended again) journey.

I think I need to stop trying to read literary fiction for a while because I just could not make it through this book. The writing is vivid and lovely but the narrative was so meandering and intangible to me. I didn't finish the book so I think I'm going to stop requesting titles like this for a while--maybe when I need some inspiration to start writing again. It's not the fault of the book, it's fully me and my preferences right now., hence middling star rating.

This just wasn’t for me. It was disjointed and really just a rambling list of observations. I’m not sure if it was the original text or the translation bit either way it did not work for me.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. This is a dense book about an author who is walking the streets of Madrid and Paris, and later New York City, and recording everything he sees. Flyers, billboards. And listening to conversations and to seemingly millions of passing, one-sided cellphone conversations. The book also follows writers from the past that the author also loves. Authors that had a touch of madness about them and seemed to take long walks in desperation and defeat: Baudelaire, De Quincey, Poe, Melville, Wilde in his last years. All this and crimes and horrors pulled from the headlines make for a hypnotic book. It takes work to climb into the rhythms of these pages, but they pay off long before you reach the end.

Reading this book, I got reminded by the simple yet complex fragments in Olga Tokarczuk’s most celebrated work, Flights. In her novel, Olga Tokarczuk attempts to provide a constellation of different angles and timelines which shift continuously throughout the story to guide us to a meditation on the state of modern travel. I still remember vividly how Flights felt to me like a religious text that makes me pause for a while from the dictation of constant notifications that never end from the internet. The internet has in some ways become our main gateway to travel and access information from the outside world. It was not wrong to say the internet as: “The world at your fingertips.”

In a rather similar fashion, Antonio Muñoz Molina provides an interesting meditation that celebrates the simplicity of life before technologies invade our daily lives. The characters are being presented here through fragments that seem to not be connected to each other here. One term that is consistently repeated throughout this book is perambulation. The narrator imagines the state in which perambulation could be studied as a discipline that discusses the movements that some artists, art critics, writers took in order to produce the works of art that christened their names in the history book: Perambulation Studies.

Using sentences that traverse freely between the realms of fiction and roman à clef, Antonio guides us into the lives of Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas de Quincey, Walter Benjamin, Fernando Pessoa, Charles Baudelaire, Henry Melville, and other artists whose lives seemed of no importance except for some scholars who specifically study them. Their works seem to take precedence, but it is inside the minds of those artists that Antonio could draw the line that connects them all. All of them were at some points in their lives, got influence or influenced each other through a series of coincidence that is largely ignored by critics.

To be in ‘the right time and the right place’ is something that I see being emphasised continuously throughout this book. Artists did not come out of anything to create some art in the world. They were influenced by something, and they happened to have the right influences at the right time. Sometimes through other people’s works, such was the case of Henry Melville and de Quincey who were influenced by Poe. But there were also cases such as Benjamin or Baudelaire who produced some of their works under unique circumstances when they had to live in exile, such was the case of Benjamin when he was exiled in Paris after Hitler took power or Baudelaire who spent most of later years of his life in Brussels.

Translated from the Spanish by Guillermo Bleichmar, this book is styled using short interconnected messages that sometimes complement and other times become sporadic. I’ll have to admit that it did trick me into thinking that this book will be a quick read, but it turned out that I spent almost one month digging into it. Shorter intervals do not mean that it makes it easy for us who live with smartphones and constant notifications that keep coming. In fact, I felt that the power of my concentration is being judged here, as though Antonio challenges the readers to put down their smartphones first and find the hidden threads in between short intervals of fragments in this book. The length is really challenging, but I like the depictions of modern life that Antonio shows us here. It is indeed, the kind of book that makes me feel like I’ve been walking alone in the crowd of people with eyes glued to their digital devices.

One Sentence Summary: A nameless man wanders Madrid and New York City, collecting experiences and telling stories of writers and artists from bygone eras.

Overall

To Walk Alone in the Crowd drops the reader into the mind of a nameless man wandering Madrid and New York City. We're caught up in his thoughts, ruminations, and all the things he hears and sees. But he's on a mission to record everything around him, to drink in all life has to offer when people these days are so focused on screens and their own lives. The wanderer rambles on about other, late wanderers within the literary world while also rambling around large cities. It's a nice literary fiction read, but made me a bit angry as a female reader. Still, it's a unique story, kind of feeling like a one-of-a-kind sort of thing, though I don't read literary fiction often, so I couldn't really say for sure.

Extended Thoughts

Follow a nameless man around the large cities of Madrid and New York City. From the beginning, he sets out to pay attention to everything happening around him, from the signs he reads to the sound of his recorded footsteps. It almost feels like he's trying to rediscover himself or the city he finds himself in, or both. Every paragraph is headed by something that made me think it was pulled from the headlines or from a magazine, bits and pieces that make no sense on their own and don't have any real relation to the content of the paragraph it heads. It's an almost dizzying mass of a man trying to take in the world, seeing everything and reading everything, and then having it all be spit back at us.

To Walk Alone in the Crowd presents an interesting clash of new and old. Clearly written in the modern age as the wanderer uses smartphones and references other modern inventions, includes a few mentions of Trump seemingly running for president, and definitely mentions it's 2016, there's a huge focus on artists and writers from decades and centuries previous. He often feels a little obsessed with them and their own wanderings, telling their stories, particularly that of Walter Benjamin, with a great deal of what seems like reverence, though I still have no clue what Benjamin wrote. There's such a focus on these other writers and artists that it seems he's trying to emulate them, but the reader never really knows who he is or what he does. The whole story comes off more as a commentary of modern life than about the nameless person whose head we are in.

I did like the focus on opening one's eyes and seeing and hearing everything going on around one, of being fully present in the here and now, of taking in life as it happens. It seems, more and more, people are so tied up in devices and staring at screens that it's refreshing to see someone experiencing what life is really about. The noise and cacophony of daily, modern life is documented in lists and each paragraph is headed by what appears to be a newspaper headline or bits and pieces pulled from a magazine. There are mentions of current news stories woven throughout, stories that might make the front page or be glossed over and forgotten by the end of the day. The wanderer feels fully present in life, taking note of everything people often miss these days due to more interest in what devices have to offer. It was refreshing and fascinating to read about all the life happening every moment around everyone.

Yet To Walk Alone in the Crowd also feels incredibly misogynistic. The lives of men are detailed over and over. The wanderer returns to their stories repeatedly. Their careers and their own itinerant behavior are documented over and over. Their personal stories are told with a great deal of care and detail and what feels like genuine understanding and reverence from the wanderer. I now know more about men like Edgar Allen Poe and others I've never heard of before. Yet the women are sexualized. The man has a wife, but I don't know anything about her other than she's beautiful, has lots of sex with him, and seems to absolutely adore him even though they don't spend much time out of bed together and he travels away from her frequently. Often, she felt forgotten or more like a lover. Even when he was going home at the end of the day, there was no mention of her at all. Then there are whole paragraphs devoted to prostitutes. The wanderer goes to great lengths to describe their sensual and sexual natures, the way they look, the way they position themselves invitingly, the things they have to offer to patrons. Most disturbing of all is how they are usually described as exotic, youthful, as though their only pursuit in life is to make their patrons very happy.

I must admit there is a lovely lyrical quality to the writing, though. It's beautiful to read, as long as you don't pay too much attention to some of the words. I loved that it drops the reader into daily life and opens their eyes to what they're missing, but the smaller subject matters bothered me and I seriously debated on abandoning this book. On one hand, I appreciated what this book is trying to do. On the other, as a female reader, it made me angry. Or maybe literary fiction is just not for me.

To Walk Alone in the Crowd can be applauded for the invitation it offers to readers to step away from a screen and into actual, real life. It shows the cacophony that thrives around us every day and offers insights and ruminations on some great (male) artists. But it definitely wasn't my cup of tea as a female reader, so it missed the mark a bit for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a review copy. All opinions expressed are my own.

Reader he lost me. This is a big book and it's exhausting in a way I did not expect. The unnamed narrator walks. He walks through a variety of cities and records his impressions and the things that he sees and hears. Interspersed with these fragments are ruminations about literary figures and his wife. It is, as promoted. a collage of a novel but one I found difficult to relate to. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction.

In this award winner, Antonio Muñoz Molina's unnamed protagonist walks the city streets of Madrid, Paris, London and New York, each city representing a different inspiration who also walked the same city, and his thoughts get inside the diverse collection. He himself roots in trash, collecting detritus that he cuts and pastes into headlines of collages filled out by thoughts of his own protagonists, filling in notebooks, writing in pencil. And the reader is treated to in depth ruminations on these icons of the past that range from De Quincey, Baudelaire, and Poe among others, with even a mention of one of my favorite Leonard Cohen songs. His thoughts are triggered by the neighborhoods he frequents, and I admit to being more partial to New York and the streets through Manhattan, most particularly Harlem, but also a sensory overload experienced as he makes his way through the Bronx on his way to a museum I didn't even know existed, a cottage that was remote from the City when E A Poe lived there two hundred years ago. Highly recommend.

A stream of consciousness, barrage of sights, thoughts started, thoughts unfinished, I started out being fascinated by this book and the odd poetry of signs and thoughts coming together. But as it went on and on, it felt overwhelming and difficult to keep up with. I admit I did not finish it.
It will appeal to the more literary readers that enjoy being inundated with words, but for me, it was simply too much.